ESPN's apology for Brent Musburger not necessary

January 9, 2013|Shannon J. Owens, SPORTS COMMENTARY

It was a warm Saturday night in Tallahassee on Sept. 5, 2005, when the world was introduced to a sexy bikini-topped cowgirl who single-handedly - and unintentionally – boiled the blood of thousands of young men across America and the ABC Sports production booth.

Almost three quarters into the eventual 10-7 upset win by No. 14 Florida State over No. 9 Miami, the camera spotted her on a routine b-roll shot of the crowd.

A star was born, and her name was Jenn Sterger. Almost eight years later, here we are again with similar circumstances, minus a bikini top.

Different game, different girl, same story, same network.

But there is one addendum here. ESPN, which operates under the same parent company as ABC, apologized for Musberger's commentary about Katherine Webb, the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron. Musburger called Webb a beautiful woman and encouraged "youngsters in Alabama" to start throwing around the football with "pops" to get a trophy girl.

I suppose a model and beauty queen shouldn't take exception to being called beautiful. That's generally good for their business.

And while we all know quarterbacks and football players in general get the supermodels (ahem, Gisele Bundchen) and beauty queens (have you seen Emmit Smith's wife?), perhaps we were better off without Musburger stating the obvious.

Real talk here, all the relevant parties involved won. ESPN generated headlines with trumped up coverage of a beauty queen despite a horrifically boring national championship game. Webb, a part-time model, bolstered her fame and her twitter account by almost 170,000 followers including, then excluding later, LeBron James. Musburger got another chance to publicly salivate over the next batch of eye candy.

Don't cry for Webb. She certainly isn't. At least that's what she told Today show anchor Matt Lauer. Donald Trump just offered the former Miss Alabama a chance to sit at the judges table for the Miss USA pageant, the first of what will probably be numerous opportunities for exposure. She's young, attractive and on the arm of a future NFL quarterback. For all intents and purposes, she's winning.

At worst, it was lazy journalism for ESPN producers to focus so much attention on Webb instead of hammering the finer points of the game, like how Nick Saban successfully neutered Notre Dame's once impressive defense.

We live in a misogynistic world where women across the globe are routinely raped, mistreated and enslaved across the globe. We live in a country where women still lack equal pay to their male counterparts, despite the fact that a record number of 98 women are serving in Congress.

And it pains me to know that Kim Kardashian is the most influential woman in America in large part because she's pretty and there's always a camera – mostly her own – to capture it.

I'm not crazy about what happened during ESPN's coverage of the national championship game. If anything, it took away from the players who worked hard to be there.